The Emperor of Any Place Read Free Page B

days, he’s just going to have to make himself something he recognizes.
    His father had been building a fishpond in the back. He can see it from the window. There’s just the hole and a pile of topsoil sitting on a black tarp. There’s a rubber liner, folded and waiting, the rain beading on its matte-black surface. A delivery of paving stones arrived only yesterday, all paid for. What do you say to the deliverymen? Nothing. You sign the sheet where the guy says, and you’ve got yourself forty square feet of polished granite.
    He wonders if he should finish the fishpond. The hole and the pile of dirt have been his excuse for not mowing the lawn. How long can he put it off? He doesn’t have anything else to do. Then he wonders if he should just shovel all the earth back into the hole. There’s a pool of muddy water at the bottom of it, like an empty grave.
    Maybe he could put his father’s ashes there.
    Right now they’re sitting in The Box.
    The Box is sitting on the kitchen counter, where he left it when he came back from the funeral parlor. The Box is a plain brown sturdy plastic container, too fat for a cereal box, too short to be laundry detergent — a box that should
in no way
be sitting on the kitchen counter.
    Dave, a friend of his father’s, helped organize the cremation, the funeral. Evan shared a checking account with his father that they used for household expenses, groceries, random bills, and whatnot. This was clearly the “whatnot” he could never have seen coming. Anyway, there was money, for now. As for the big picture, well, that remained to be seen.
    He was pretty sure everything was his: the house, the car, the savings. He didn’t think his father had some secret lover who would suddenly come out of the woodwork and cause trouble. There wouldn’t be a charity he’d signed all his money over to: the Ship-in-a-Bottle Foundation. At least he didn’t expect so. His mother was long gone. He thought of all those stories of people sitting in a lawyer’s office and learning the horrible truth that they’ve been cut out of the will. He really didn’t expect anything like that. Dad wasn’t one for mysteries. If there was one thing he knew it was that his father loved him more than anyone or anything else. That was pretty amazing.
    And it wasn’t making any of this easier.
    So there was money, apparently; how to get at it was another thing. He needed help. He was over sixteen, an adult. Whoa! That came as a surprise. Driving the car was one thing; settling an estate was something else.
    “If you were from my homeland, you’d be a ward of the state.” This nugget of information came from Olivia Schlaepfer; Olivia who walked her Siamese cat on a leash. Any Place’s resident steampunker.
    “Where are you from?” Evan asked. “A Dickens novel?”
    “No,” she said, as if his question had been serious. “Switzerland.” It was at the brunch after the memorial service. When he first saw her arrive at the chapel, he almost cried at the thoughtfulness of her showing up, even if she was in a studded black leather jerkin, white crinoline, and black aviator boots. She had an ancient black aviator cap on her head, too. She looked like an Oreo. Then she came over to talk to him, and soon enough he really was on the verge of crying — or screaming. “You’re not an adult until you turn eighteen in Switzerland,” she said.
    “Well, good for them,” he said. “I’m an adult here. Children’s Aid won’t take me.” He threw out his hands like
What’s a guy supposed to do? Move to Switzerland?
    “So, you’re an orphan,” she said, with a gleam in her eye that suggested the idea seemed attractive, if only in a steampunk kind of way.
    He could correct her on the orphan thing: technically there was a mother somewhere, in England, last he’d heard. But, no, he had no proof of that. “I guess so.”
    She nodded and smiled as if they were sharing a very special secret.
    He did what people advised